Once upon a time, Isabel Allende was the doyenne of the weird and wondrous, the heiress to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's kingdom of magical realism. With early novels and short story collections such as "Of Love and Shadows" and "Eva Luna," and particularly her first novel, "The House of the Spirits," the Chilean writer proved herself one of the very few writers capable of following in Garcia Marquez's capacious footsteps, adding her name to the long list of remarkable fabulists from Latin America.

In recent years, though, Allende has turned her back on the literary style that brought her to the dance, preferring a more accessible but significantly less appealing method of historical adventure, of which "Inés of My Soul" is the latest installment. Allende's take on the historical novel in "Inés of My Soul" is solid, well-constructed and entirely arid. The effortless mystery and charm of "The House of the Spirits" are entirely lacking from the pages of "Inés," which seems to be written by a different writer altogether.

"Inés of My Soul" purports to be the last testament of Inés Suarez, a real-life 16th century Spaniard who was among the first Europeans to journey to present-day Chile. Inés is a seamstress and cook in the Spanish city of Plasencia who travels to the New World to chase after her feckless husband, Juan de Malaga. Once she arrives, she learns that Juan is dead, but discovers an entire world of opportunity for a capable woman. Aligning herself with the ambitious, ruthless soldier and politician Pedro de Valdivia, and through her erotic affiliations, her political skill, and her native-born compassion for her constituents, European and Indian, Inés becomes a gobernadora in a Chile still undergoing the bloody process of birthing itself.

Inés sees the New World as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for reinvention, both for herself and her countrymen:

"Unlike Juan, I did not believe there was any such thing as a city of gold, or magical waters that bestowed eternal youth, or Amazons who made merry with men and then sent them on their way laden with jewels, but I suspected there was something even more prized to be found there: freedom. In the Americas every man was his own master; he never had to bow to anyone, he could begin anew, be a different person, live a different life."

Her quest for a new life proves successful, but her countrymen are less able to escape the bonds of their desires, re-creating the murderous passions of Europe in a new land, with a new enemy.

Inés is rescued by Allende from history's dust bin, where she had slumbered for nearly 400 years, but once recovered, she has little to do here. Allende tells the entertaining story of Inés' erotic and political adventures (her entanglements with men noble and otherwise), and the marvelous experience of exploring a new world, but the drama is mostly perfunctory, lacking the propulsive drive of her early work. It's as if her sympathetic imagination fails her. She attempts to balance the colonists' viewpoint with some intimation of the unprecedented disaster to be visited on the natives of what would become Chile, but her heart is not fully in it, and she leaves off at a few stray musings by Inés about the innate desire to fight to protect one's home.

Indeed, fighting is at the heart of "Inés of My Soul," the slash of sword against flesh being the book's favorite evoked sound effect. The novel's longest set-piece is the vicious attack by the Mapuche against the colonial outpost at Santiago, on Sept. 11, 1541. In detailing the near-calamity visited on the Spanish by the vengeful Mapuche on that ever-familiar date, Allende seems to have our own recent tragedies less in mind than the one visited on Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, when Allende's uncle, Salvador Allende, was deposed as Chile's president in a right-wing military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. In Allende's telling, Chile's more recent travails are an echo, and an outgrowth, of its early struggles, with Inés' reflections on the 1541 massacre sounding like the writer's thoughts on 1973:

"I have often thought about that fateful September 11, and have tried to make sense of events, but I don't believe that anyone can describe exactly what happened; each of the participants has a different version, according to his or her part in it. The smoke was dense, the confusion overwhelming, the noise deafening. We were beside ourselves, fighting for our lives, maddened by the blood and violence."

Allende is unable to put flesh on the 16th century bones of her tale, and the implicit comparison to Chile's Pinochet nightmare, so tangible in its horror, only serves to reveal the relative paucity of her accomplishment here. Allende the magical realist has been replaced by Allende the historical re-creationist, and the results are not encouraging.